#6 A Capital at Wells

6  A Capital at Wells

During the father’s walking—how he look

down by now in soft boards, Henry, pass
and what he feel or no, who know?—
as during hís broad father’s, all the breaks
& ill-lucks of a thriving pioneer
back to the flying boy in mountain air,

Vermont’s child to go out, and while Keats sweat’

for hopeless inextricable lust, Henry’s fate,
and Ethan Allen was a calling man,
all through the blind one’s dream of the start,
when Day was killing Porter and had to part
lovers for ever, fancy if you can,

while the cardinals’ guile to keep Aeneas out

was failing, while in some hearts Chinese doubt
inscrutably was growing, toward its end,
and a starved lion by a water-hole
clouded with gall, while Abelard was whole
these grapes of stone were being proffered, friend.
 

I figured there would be days like this. I had a student once who just stared at me through the whole lecture on the second day of class, not taking notes, with such an incredulous look on her face—are you kidding me? Are you frickin’ kidding me? The note of a drop came from the registrar 30 minutes after class was over and I never saw her again.

Much of this one is obscure to me. Reading Berryman’s biography and the intro to his collected poems may help clear up the references, but there’s no chance of that today. Do we get some of Henry’s backstory? I don't know if this resonates with Berryman’s bio, who is from Oklahoma. His father committed suicide, which was terribly hard on the son. There is going to be more than a little of that.

Vermont, Ethan Allen, Wells a village in Vermont near the New York border. Ethan Allen, strong prosperous farmer, Vermont hero, hated New York and New Yorkers, and that drove his Revolutionary War escapades a lot more than patriotism or his orientation toward the British. He was quite ready to join Vermont up with British Canada if the New Yorkers didn’t back off. The Green Mountain Boys were guerilla raiders against New York as much as they were patriotic heroes. Fathers, manhood. Abelard was Heloise’s teacher, then lover, then husband, father of her child, then her family attacked and castrated him and sent her to a convent—for the rest of her life. Tragic lovers in life, they are buried together.

Aside from the thicket of references I can't quite penetrate, there’s a downward movement here—a pensive sauntering on a boardwalk, meditating on father-figures and their influence, the ambivalent legacy of an over-glorified, complex hero, into lust, then murder or a duel, the guile of an institutional cabal, “Chinese doubt,” the starved lion--the gall of his rage irrelevant--a further erosion of the ideal of strength and manhood, finally into castration.

Proffer your grapes of stone?—no thanks. But in the most bitter of violations, they can be taken.